Google Bard Boosted With Adobe's AI Art

Adobe's AI art will be available in Google's Bard

Google and Adobe have announced a partnership that will see Adobe’s Firefly become the AI art generator for Bard.

Google will hope the deal, which was announced at the company’s I/O conference, will start to put some much-needed momentum behind its Bard AI assistant, which has struggled to gain traction in a market that has swiftly been dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Adobe Firefly has been on beta test for the past couple of months, but is now being integrated into Google Bard so that when people ask the AI assistant to create images from text prompts, it will be delivered via Adobe’s service. Adobe says users will have “the ability to continue the creative journey further in Adobe Express,” allowing users to create items such as flyers or social media posts from the art they generate.

Adobe is trying to distance itself from rivals such as OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 by emphasizing that there’s no risk of copyright infringement by using the art created by its AI. Firefly has been trained on “Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired”, according to the company.

All of the art generated by Firefly will carry Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative’s (CAI) credentials, which the company claims acts as a “nutrition label” for digital content.

“At this critical moment in history, as generative AI becomes more powerful and prevalent than ever, people need a way to tell what’s behind the content they’re consuming,” said Dana Rao, general counsel and chief trust officer at Adobe. “Content Credentials will enable creators to tell their stories authentically, while providing easy-to-use tools to verify how a piece of content was created and modified.”

Rival AI art services have often been trained on the open internet, and results sometimes carry telltale watermarks which raise concerns over whether copyrighted material is being included in results.

Text effects are part of Adobe's Firefly offering

Firefly currently offers a range of different AI art services to beta testers. The text-to-image service will be familiar to anyone who’s used AI art in recent months, generating pictures from text prompts. The service has improved since it first entered beta testing, although it’s still a long way behind rivals such as Midjourney when it comes to accurately generating faces and other details.

The text effects feature is unique to Firefly, allowing users to enter a word and then describe the style or textures they want to appear in the text, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Recently, the company also added the ability to recolor vector images, allowing users to upload their SVG files and apply different color schemes to their artwork by simply describing the colors they want (ie. ‘midnight blues’ or ‘spring blossom’).

Adobe has been testing these features in a beta site and is yet to integrate them into its Creative Cloud apps. Subscribers who pay Adobe upwards of $50 a month for the full Creative Cloud suite may be somewhat surprised to see the AI tools being integrated into Google Bard, rather than Adobe’s own apps.

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